Agate – 6.th holonistic gemstone exploration

Here is a short blog on Agate, followed by a deeper article for the reader that wants to explore Agate in a broader perspective. The article gives a unified perception on very different aspects of life.

The exploration of Agate took part on 4.th of June 2015.

AGATE – shortversion
Agate is a unique an easy gemstone to recognize even if it comes in many variations and colours.

It is one of the nice stones we get from Silica. Agate is a silicon dioxide (SiO2 ). We have already explored Amethyst and Jasper, but also Citrine, Topaz, Hellotrope, Carnelian, Onyx and Opal are all made from Silica.

The picture above shows some typical Agate nodes that have been cut in halves or in slices.

Inside the nodes that are created in volcanic rock, these bubbles of the volatile elements deposit layers. These layers create the nice stripes, the main characteristic of Agate. This is like the layers of Russian Matrjosjka dolls, or layers of existence.

This picture shows the similarity between the layers of Agate, the Matrjosjka dolls and layers of the human aura. We also can use this analogy for the layers in the atom, or in the expanding areas of action for the little baby; from the womb to the cradle, house, garden, village, country and whole world. (More about this in the article that follows)

This process where volatile substances condense and become rock, represents the very core of the qualities in this gemstone. In Agate the shapeless, formless hot gases condense or crystalize into fixed structured solid rock. They materialise into solidity. The dynamic forces in nature becomes fixed into a dead structure, or an analogous world where things float into each other seamless in a continuum becomes layered, fractioned and digitalized. Agate is created by hot, dynamic, volcanic gas bubbles condensing from the inner surface and in this way materialize layer by layer into a fixed structure.

Agate creates a connection between the formed, shaped, fixed, structured aspects of existence and the living creating forces that are behind everything. Like a meeting point or two way process in equilibrium between what the alchemist called Solve & Coagula.

In this way Agate helps you to dissolve false structures, false expectations that shape and hold you in a fixed frame. Your own delusions of must, have to, should, all the modal verbs. It releases you from having to do things that are based on your upbringing, your past, the expectations or demands from society and other people. It dissolves structures and let them become adjustable.
That gives you the ability to live out your true potential in full freedom from others. It gives you the freedom to feel the inner potential and let that stabilize into a new structure.

With softness it dissolves what holds you back from progressing and helps the potential that still is not manifested come forward in your life and condense, incarnate, and give you the structure you are becoming.

As a summary you can say that the potential that always was there, your inner truth, from the highest aspects of creation comes in with its fire and dissolves lies, what has become stuck and rigid, so the real you again can come forward and manifest!

This ends the short version.

AGATE ARTICLE – extended version, for you who want to see it from a broader perspective

The holonistic knowledge we gathered from Agate can be understood much broader if we look into some very varied approaches to reality.

Let us in this perspective explore some central aspects of physics, epistemology, psychology, genetics and evolution, to better understand the process in Agate.

It will give us a holonistic understanding, an understanding that describes the wholeness in a unified way and in perspective of a bigger wholeness. It is an understanding that combines the holistic or whole and the core or essence in a simple and beautiful way.

PHYSICSEverything physical that can be touched is made of molecules. But also fluids and gases consist of molecules. Molecules are at the threshold of matter. They are the building blocks of everything material or physical. But molecules themselves consist of atoms. We have a little bit more than 100 different atoms and they are the building blocks of all molecules.

Atoms alone as a separate entity, does not exist for a long time in nature before they relocate into new molecules. In very hot conditions molecules “evaporate” into atoms. And in even more energetic states atoms “evaporate” into ions and sub-atomic particles. As we move beyond the level of molecules the physical “matter like” nature evaporates into energy.

We call them particles but their nature is only particle like in the interactions of our experiments. Imagine a sea wave that froths at its top. The froth is its particle nature. The wave soon goes back to a wave nature and the froth is gone. You would not say the wave is built up of white froth, but it can turn into it for a short time. An electron in an atom can froth as a “particle” on one side of the atom, to dissolve into its wave nature and reappear some other place as a new froth “particle” of the wave on an other place in the atom. The froth is not moving like a particle, it appears and reappears. The “water” surrounding and atom in its surface can appear as an electron-particle or electron-wave. It is both at the same time.

You could also visualise it as an elastic surface completely transparent and when you put your finger on it, it reacts with light, like a plasma bulb. In short we can say that behind the apparently solid physical matter is something like an energetic sea that evades us. It only becomes apparent as it is touched by our experiment.

In essence the meeting point between solve and coagula is seen here between molecules and atoms, on the threshold between matter and energy. The magic between the dynamic creative force always dynamic and the stuck structured material nature.
Agate coming from the condensation of very hot rock, touches the same threshold, and has in its quality an ability to bring you in touch with this aspect of reality, the reality behind the apparent one.

EPISTEMOLGY
Epistemology is the science of knowledge. In epistemology we know that there are certain basic things in existence we cannot know or prove. We simple have to believe them, or take them as our perception of reality.
We do not know it there is an external reality or if it all is only in our minds or consciousness. There are people that think both of these are the only right things to believe.

These different positions are called and epistemological stance or standpoint. It is a position, a belief that reflects your view of reality, your ontological view. It is basically what you believe is out there in the world, in existence, or if it is all a creation of your mind.

The two extreme positions in epistemology are the realist and the relativist.The realistThe realist believes reality is the external world consisting of matter. This is a world that can be measured and examined and reduced into components. When you have the information to describe its structures and functions you can predict what will happen, almost like a machine or a program or game in a computer.
In short the realist is materialistic, reductionistic, positivistic and deterministic.
With this position it is obvious that knowledge is best collected and confirmed with the hypothetical deductive method. Randomised controlled trials that are collected in systemamic reviews are believed to reflect knowledge of reality solid as rocks. The world out there is material, can be cut into parts, can be examined and measured in an objective way, no doubt about it, says the realist. Is there nothing more between heaven and earth?

The relativistAt the other extreme you have the relativist that believes it is all in your mind. Your senses of sight, sound, touch etc. are all frequencies or energy past on through your body to your brain, here they are changed from neural signals into what you perceive as being out there. All you can say anything about is how it appears to you in your mind. In the extreme case the relativist does not even believe the external world exists.
The world out there is more like an illusion, even matter is an exception in the universe, or regarded as just a short and locally very limited transitional state in a pulsating universe of energy. Matter is built up of elements that even if they are named “particles” have nothing in common with what we normally think of as particles. The smallest particles can only be described from the ghost tracts they leave us when we collide them under very extreme conditions. From this perspective the relativist has a point too.

The relativist would say that what you perceive is changing with the changes in your awareness or stage of evolution. The whole external world as you see it now, might change to a land of shadows when you perceive the reality behind, and that new reality becomes the real reality, to borrow the analogy from Plato´s cave analogy.

As you evolve and become more and more in contact with the original creative forces you are even at the point where your own reality is formed. Matter becomes the veil of Maya, causations becomes illusion as all becomes a matter of increased synchronicity, it is no point in examining the external world because it will all change as your awareness changes. It is all about your mind and your awareness.

For the relativist sitting on a mountain and meditating year after year, will not be isolation and exclusion, but might be experienced as a much deeper and broader presence with the world than the realist can ever imagine.

We live in a time where the realist dominates, but it has not always been so, and more and more people start to see how extremely limited and stuck they can be. The pendulum is about to swing again.

We could say that the realist is as stuck on solid matter as the materialized rock. The relativist on the other side is difficult to fix, more like the volatile element in the formation of Agate. He is like the unperceivable plasmatic field condensing to gas, fluids and finally becoming mater-realized layers of Agate.

It is possible to define positions between these two extremes. One could suggest that an “energist” neither believes in matter nor that all is in your mind, but that we have to go with the flow, that all is in a process of flux.

Agate can help to resolve or give a balanced perspective if one is stuck in the extremes of epistemology and not able to see both perspectives.
It does this by acting into the very core of your being.

PSYCHOLOGY

Our awareness has many levels even deep layers that we are not aware off. In psychology Carl Gustav Jung is known for having discovered and named the deepest of these, the collective unconscious. We normally relate to our psychological nature through what we experience as “Me” the ego or we could say the sum of our thoughts, feelings and senses. The awaken “Me” or “Ego” is what we regard as our awareness.
But we have also deeper layers. The next layers are the sub-conscious, the unconscious and the collective unconscious with less and less access or awareness in each. Let us explore this closer.

It is like we sit on the frothing top of a wave representing the ego. This narrow peak or top is based on or is on top of a much broader upper part of the wave. This bigger part represents the larger sub-conscious in our analogy. Here we collect all the ego has experienced through life, all our experiences, associations, memories and dreams. You only remember some of them, most of the memories or dreams you ever had are like lost. All that are “lost” are there but deeper down in the wave. This is what we call the unconscious. It is called unconscious because we have a big difficulty getting access to these dreams and memories.

The wave is not alone, it merges with all other waves becoming the sea and the sea has in its deep realms a black state that connects all seas and all waves. If we imagine we collect all that all people that ever lived have ever experienced, we can imagine we are going to the deep deep levels of the sea, connecting all waves that exist and ever existed.

Deep within we have a potential connection to this debt, we use this material in our dreams and it can flow forward to us through art, symbol, intuition and creativity. It is there in art works, in symbols and concepts the humans have “created” or should we rather say manifested from the collective unconscious. You could go so far to say that there is nothing appearing or being created in the human mind that has not already been there in the deep. Like no new wave in the sea is nothing but the same sea in a new form.

On our way back up from the deep sea of the collective unconscious that connects the frothing top of all the individuals that ever existed, we have degrees of increasing awareness but also degrees from bigger units of groups of humans, to smaller and smaller groups ending in the extended family, the nearest family and finally only you the individual at the narrow frothing top.

The more individual, the more objective aware, the more subjective the more you start to connect from within. In the deep unaware realms we are connected with everyone with all that is. We live in an illusion of separation. The price of individuation is separation, what many humans value most is what isolates them. The objective scientific ideal is analysing, separating and reducing, the price of it is separation. Going within to the realm of the deeper layers, to the inner life of the relativist is connecting us in the feeling of respect, consideration and brotherhood of man.

The price of individuation, of the individual with a structured ego of its own, is a loss of the collective knowledge base of experience, of a deep common coherent existence. The consequence of merging with the sea of the unconscious is a challenge of extinction of the individual in us.

Agate helps you to find a healthy balance in this process of individuation or merging with the all. If we are stuck in our individual ego it helps us to merge, if we are lost in the collective sea it helps us to individuate.

GENETICSIn genetics you could say that you are unique in your make up, but this uniqueness is based on your ancestors. Primarily the close family then the extended family, your ethnic group, the whole human kind and basically all life upon earth. This is very much like the wave we just described in psychology. We share a genetic pool, but that pool is again the result of a much bigger pool.

In the human genome just a fraction is believed to be unique to humans, we share a lot with animals and even bacteria and virus represents a huge percentage of the genetic sea where we are the top of one of its waves.

Genetically speaking you are the froth at the top of a genetic wave, a froth that only lasts your life span. If we connect this analogy with the section above we could challenge the idea of bacteria and virus as external invaders and even looking at them as reconnecting us with the debt as we evolve. Let us explore evolution a bit.

EVOLUTIONThere are some interesting features to be seen in the evolution of life. Evolution comes with increased complexity and with increased integration of new abilities in the more complex organisms.
It is not like the increased complexity is the creation of something new it is rather the integration of something that is there in the external world. It could be viewed as if external qualities become internalized, or like a potential in the deep psychological sea emerges to the surface. Because it seems to emerge from the inside into the centre like from no-where, like a bubble in the sea suddenly breaking to the surface. Or the sea itself is rising up to form a frothing wave. Let is give some examples.

Science tells us that long time back the earth only contained minerals that were so hot that no water could cool down to even form a lake. As the earth cooled, condensation made rain and rain made the first shallow areas of water, the foundation for life was laid. But did life appear from an incidence or from the deep?

Imagine for a while all the stars just in our galaxy, sorry it is a request that we cannot even imagine, our mind just cannot. But we can imagine that many of them might have planets with similar conditions as our earth, actually also an imaginable number. And we have not even started to talk about all the galaxies or even all the universes in the metaverse! Nobody knows the amount of stars in our galaxy there are a few different estimations and some say 100 billion others 400 billion (100-400 milliards = 1-400 000 000 000). So if there is one with a planet like ours for every million it is still 100 00 – 400 000.

There are with no doubt an immense amount of planets that have developed shorter or longer time than our earth. The deep see of just our universe, has experienced it all in its deep unconscious, when life appeared at our planet it was not a new invention, it was not an accident, it was following the order of what has happened billions of billions of times before. So did life appear on the surface of the earth or emerge from the debt of the universe?

At one point a unit appeared that within itself contained life, the first cell also on our earth. During 2 billions of years (2 milliards = 2 000 000 000), that was the only kind of life on this planet. Within those cells a centre appeared, call it a hearth or a brain, that science calls a nucleus.

The first kind of cells that were there from the start are called prokaryotic, with the new creative control unit or headquarters they are called eukaryotic. Karyon is the name of the nucleus. First something appeared that had life within, now it got a nucleus within.

The less evolved prokaryotic cell has a huge amount of variation with multiple single celled organisms of different kinds, all being bacteria. With the eukaryotic cells we see less amount of organisms, the cells are bigger and eventually join together in multicellular beings. These beings become plants, fungi and animals. The clue to all of this is the new appearance of a nucleus in the centre.

If we move further up the line of evolution to plants and from monocots to dicots in the plant kingdom we also see that the transportation of fluids, the vasculation evolves from being organized in bundles (multi-) into a concentric distribution having a central point (nucleus) to organize around. When animal life evolves from cold blooded (ectotherm ) to warm blooded (endotherm) we also see a change in vasculation and the heart. Again something new like the nucleus appears within.

This time it is the heat that appears within. Warm-blooded animals keep their own temperature constant independent of the environment, the cold-blooded take the same temperature as the environment. Warm-blooded animals use a lot of what they take in from the environment as food to produce heat. The cold-blooded do not need to eat that much and can survive longer periods without food. They can even be almost dead during very cold or dry periods.
Warm blooded have a more energetic circulation too, more efficient with four chambers in the heart, like a 4 vault engine comparer to a 2 vault. They also keep the blood with oxygen and the blood without separated, showing the increased complexity.

There are an immense number of different viruses, many bacteria, less multicellular being and a few thousand mammals and birds at the top of evolution. Minerals have structure, plant also have structure but add life, growth and breathing, animals have all of the previous but add digestion and an internal space with organs and an internal inner life with sensations and an awareness of being a subject. An internal awareness is now appearing within. Humans have all that but have an increased autonomy and ability for abstraction, creating symbols and tools to change the environment for good or bad. An internal ability to create meaning, abstraction and symbols appear..

Like the frothing top of the wave the human abilities are on top of abilities of animals, fungi, plants, bacteria and virus. In the womb the human foetus goes through a repetition of the stages of life and as well after birth we complete the mineral nature by forming bone from cartilage and getting our second set of teeth. After that we have a period of completing our growth the plant like aspect, before we enter our teens with emotions, sensations, sexuality and finding out which is our heard. First then are we ready to mature into individual mental autonomy and laying the ground for stretching further later in life, further than the average human into the spiritual realms.

At the same time as we evolve, we expand our circle of action from the womb, to the cradle, to the floor, to the garden, to the closest streets, to the village, to bigger towns, to the country, to the world …..

Each step of transition is a phase of letting go of something to integrate the next step, the appearance of something new condensing within and the evaporation of some of the old, solve & coagula, each such transition or struggle to move on or let go is facilitated by Agate.

Final wordsGoing back to the analogy of the wave again we can say that at the top we have the rational human being, a realist with focus on the material manifestations, able to relate to other humans on objective and equal terms, living in a world were concepts and terms are well defined, where reality is regarded as objects, objects of physical or intellectual nature. It is an intellectual analytic person with an aim of discriminating and reducing reality, of deconstructing it and understand things by separating them to wave tops called particles, matter, concepts, things in short “matter of facts”.

As this person matures, finds himself in different situations that promote a contact with the deeper, and starts to see that all those matters of facts have no value if it is not of use to a subject or is understood by a subject, it start to soften up change its priorities and perspectives. Agate helps you to reach the top of the wave as well as transcend it.

If you are stuck in the “matter of facts” you might feel a desire for human warmth, for socialising, for relating to people from more warm and open cultures (If yours is a northern one), you might open to the inner world and evaluate the subjective realm. If you are stuck in any kind of segregation you will feel the warmth and value of opening up. You will appreciate and long to connect to the people with qualities from warmer countries and cultures.

Let Agate dissolve any fixed rigid or limiting conceptions or states in or of yourself, and let it help you to manifest your potential as a structure to come.

PS: The name Agate

The name comes from the Semitic aqiq or achit meaning separation of a new-born´s hair. A rite that is connected with the name giving is an offering of two compatible sheep for a boy and one for a girl. In greek it became achates a name also given to a river in Sicily where a deposit of chalcedonites was mined, becoming achates in latin and then Agate.

Even the separation of hair by shaving the new born and the name giving as a defined identity, can be seen as layers of separation or manifestation. Giving a new structure or identification.

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